Fedora 13 Talking Points

From FedoraProject

This page is a work in progress.Talking points are not yet finished for F13 - you are invited and encouraged to help!

Talking points have been chosen.The ones you see below are the final selection - now we need to fill their details in.

These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 13 release. For information on how these talking points were chosen, see Talking Points SOP. They are intended to help Ambassadors quickly present an overview of highlighted features when talking about the release.

Redesigned user management interface

The user account tool has been completely redesigned, and now makes it easy to configure personal information, make a personal profile picture or icon, generate a strong passphrase, and set up login options. Designed and implemented by several members of the Desktop SIG.

NetworkManager improvements include CLI

Adds dial-up modem support for older Bluetooth-equipped phones, to complement the personal-area networking already supported in Fedora. Addresses a long-standing missing link for command-line junkies who want NetworkManager to integrate with the CLI. Also useful for jetsetters who operate in lower-power text modes. Provides a better indicator for signal strength, and lets people know if they are roaming.

Summary sentence of talking point.

Experimental 3D extended to free Nouveau driver

3D support was added to the completely free and open source software (FOSS) radeon driver in F12 [adamw note: this is not entirely accurate. radeon supported 3D for r400 and earlier chips for years. what was added in F12 was experimental support for r500 and r600 chips], and now this support has been extended in F13 to the equally free nouveau driver. Fedora and its sponsor Red Hat are dedicated to improving the quality and coverage of completely free accelerated video drivers. While we support user choice and do not prevent use of closed, proprietary drivers, we also recognize that these drivers sometimes conflict with and cause problems in the software written by FOSS community members. We prefer to honor the commitment of the FOSS community with our own commitment to free drivers that complement their work.

Summary sentence of talking point.

For administrators

Improvements that make system administrators' lives better.

BFO

BFO is a unique feature in Fedora. We're the first to offer it. It allows users to download a single, tiny image and install current and future versions of Fedora without having to download additional images.

Summary sentence of talking point.

Authconfig UI redesign

Better integration of new SSSD technology in the configuration UI for authentication, and a full UI revamp making it much easier to configure your Fedora system to work in a number of different authentication environments.

Summary sentence of talking point.

Pioneering NFS features

Fedora 13 changes its default to NFSv4, resulting in improved performance with a seamless transition for users. Clients gracefully falling back to other versions if required by an NFS server. Continues Fedora's role as a front-runner for NFSv4 -- the first distribution to include it, the first to switch to it by default. The other major step forward in NFS is support for IPv6, so clients in mixed or IPv6 only environments can now make full use of NFS.

Summary sentence of talking point.

Zarafa

Fedora 13 now makes available a complete groupware suite that can be used as an Exchange replacement for Web-based mail, calendaring, and tasks. Features include IMAP/POP and iCal/CalDAV capabilities, native mobile phone support, the ability to integrate with existing Linux mail servers, a full set of programming interfaces, and a comfortable look and feel using modern Ajax technologies.

Summary sentence of talking point.

Experimenting with btrfs

Btrfs is capable of creating lightweight filesystem snapshots that can be mounted (and booted into) selectively. The created snapshots are copy-on-write snapshots, so there is no file duplication overhead involved for files that do not change between snapshots. It allows developers to feel comfortable experimenting with new software without fear of an unusable install, since automated snapshots allow them to easily revert to the previous day's filesystem.

Summary sentence of talking point.

Dogtag Certificate System

Dogtag Certificate System is an enterprise-class open source Certificate Authority (CA) supporting all aspects of digital certificate lifecycle management including issuing certificates, renewing and revoking certificates.Typical usage of Digital Certificates include SSL/TLS certificates, for sending and recieving digitally signed and encrypted email, SSL authentication based Single sign-on, Object signing and Code signing Certificates.
Support for Key archival to read/decrypt data if a user loses the private encryption key used to encrypt that data. Online Certificate Status Protocol(OCSP) services to quickly determine the revocation status of a certificate without having to directly check huge Certificate Revocation Lists(CRL). Smart card enrollment and management.

Summary sentence of talking point.

For developers

Innovations that make Fedora a great platform for software developers.

SystemTap static probes

While Fedora used to have pretty decent introspection tools for the kernel, this release expands the visibility of monitoring on a higher level what is happening inside language runtimes like Java, Python and TCL. A start has been made with other user space applications like PostgreSQL, which will be extended to many more applications in Fedora 14 (this is a continuous process, making Fedora a better and tightly integrated developer platform). The feature page already has compelling examples for how this makes observing what your Python programs do very powerful. Additional examples should be added for the other language runtimes enabled by this feature.

Summary sentence of talking point.

Easier Python debugging

Engineering team member David Malcolm has added new support that allows developers working with mixed libraries (Python and C/C++) to get more complete information when debugging. Backtraces will now show output from code written in both languages, including those generated by Fedora's Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT), and developers can more quickly improve software. --Dmalcolm 03:55, 20 February 2010 (UTC): I think it's also a good idea to combine this with the python part of Systemtap Static Probes - both give you more visibility into the internals of Python code on your system, albeit it in different ways.

Summary sentence of talking point.

Parallel-installable Python 3

Fedora 13 also blazes a trail with a parallel-installable Python 3 stack that will help programmers write and test code for use in both Python 2.6 and Python 3 environments. Beyond the core libraries, some additional libraries are already provided, with more expected to follow throughout this and future releases.

Summary sentence of talking point.

NetBeans 6.8 first IDE to support entire Java 6 EE spec

NetBeans IDE 6.8 is the first IDE to offer complete support for the entire Java EE 6 spec with improved support for JSF 2.0/Facelets, Java Persistence 2.0, EJB 3.1 including using EJBs in web applications, RESTful web services, and GlassFish v3. We also recommend it for developing with the latest JavaFX SDK 1.2.1, and for creating PHP web applications with the new PHP 5.3 release or with the Symfony Framework. [Are technologies like glassfish/java 6 ee, javafx, etc. packaged for Fedora and actually Free Software?]

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